I've been having a look at Wheezy again recently to see how configure it to my own liking which includes, of course OSS4.I successfully installed OSS4 from the main repository and sound quality seems to be just as good as in Squeeze but it doesn't seem to be very compatible with pulseaudio although I have tried configuring /etc/pulse/default.pa

First Installation: checking all kernels...Building only for 3.2.0-2-amd64Building initial module for 3.2.0-2-amd64Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.2.0-2-amd64 (x86_64)Consult /var/lib/dkms/oss4/4.2-build2006/build/make.log for more information.

The oss4-dkms installed just fine and osstest worked. After this I configured the system to use OSS4 instead of ALSA in exactly the same way I do in Squeeze, as detailed hereThe issue now is what to do with pulseaudio so my first attempt has been to try and configure it to be used with OSS4 according to Step 4 in a How-to I found here. The results are not satisfactory; the voulume control is useless for controlling the volume, unlike the gnome-volume-control-applet in Squeeze which works perfectly. When I right-click on it to edit the Sound Preferences for my 5.1 surround sound system, all I see is:Choose a device for sound outputAudigyLSfrontI'm only able to use ossmix commands and ossxmix to control sound.I don't know how Wheezy is going to solve the OSS4/pulseaudio combination. I can't see any need for pulseaudio at all. I notice in mageia (a community-driven fork of mandriva, for those who are not familiar with it) not only allows the user to choose between ALSA and OSS4 during installation but also allows pulseaudio to be disabled in its control centre; however, in Wheezy, pulseaudio is, as I've commented elsewhere, entangled with everthing else. For example, if you simulate its removal, this results in something like this:

[size=85]$ aptitude remove --purge -s pulseaudioThe following packages will be REMOVED: pulseaudio 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 135 not upgraded.Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 4,835 kB will be freed.The following packages have unmet dependencies: libcanberra-pulse : Depends: pulseaudio but it is not going to be installed. pulseaudio-module-x11 : Depends: pulseaudio but it is not going to be installed. pulseaudio-esound-compat : Depends: pulseaudio but it is not going to be installed. gnome-core : Depends: pulseaudio but it is not going to be installed.The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

To check for further dependencies (don't worry about any recommends or suggests)

Nice one! Thanks for the reply: That's blown away pulseaudio and from my Wheezy. While I was about it, I also got rid of libasound2-plugins (See Edit below]vlc-plugins-pulsegstreamer0.10-pulseaudiopulseaudio-utilsWell, it remains to be seen whether pulseaudio and its gui interface will be compatible with OSS4 when wheezy is released as stable without having to remove it and associated packeges manually. Probably not since it is assumed everyone wants ALSA. So your reply will definitely need to be referenced in a future how-to for OSS4 in Wheezy.Edit: i restored libasound2-plugins because, without it, there was no sound using flash.

I've routinely done builds where I've stripped away ALSA without installing Pulse at all. I then install an OSS4 .deb I created from the source on the opensound.com site. Takes about 15 seconds to install on my old single core Athlon but then it's my default and only sound system in use.

squeezy wrote:I've routinely done builds where I've stripped away ALSA without installing Pulse at all. I then install an OSS4 .deb I created from the source on the opensound.com site. Takes about 15 seconds to install on my old single core Athlon but then it's my default and only sound system in use.

OSS4 on an old Athlon? Interesting; just curiosity, but, what sound card is it? How does audio compare with ALSA?I too have built OSS4 from source as described in viewtopic.php?f=16&t=52919&start=15#p395847 but, since there's nothing wrong with OSS4 in the wheezy repository, it's naturally first choice. Besides, for an old computer like that, it might be interesting to build a customised kernel to optimize performance but for that, I'd install OSS4 from the repositories beforehand so that it gets built in.Yes, it's easy to remove ALSA and now - with cynwulf's tip - pulseaudio, which was a bit of a spanner in the works in wheezy. Now I'm looking at finding a replacement for the pulseaudio volume control applet/sound preferences which got removed with pulseaudio.

Old sound card as well, VIA VT8237 AC97, actually a Realtek codec, ALC 658 I think. The OSS4 package I made has a module for this device so it works perfectly. The OSS4 packages in wheezy and sid used to not install so that's why I ended up building my own. I'll have to try the repo version again, it's been several months since I last tried the prepackaged version.

With this lowend hardware it's hard to hear a huge difference but I found OSS4 to be a bit clearer sounding with more L/R definition in the soundscape.

The stock kernels work fine on this machine. In fact, I haven't really had any hardware support or performance problems to speak of with this old rig. I've run everything from squeeze to sid to Ubuntu 12.04 and various Mint releases on it with no problems. Keeps the old machine kicking!

For anyone interested in the details, installation of the necessary packages was straightforward but first it was necessary to get rid of the following 3 metapackages as explained by Cynwulf above. Note: The following command may look a bit drastic but it does NOT blitz the entire desktop environment but, if anyone wishes to simulate it in their normal user teminal, just append an -s thus:

and flash after editing /etc/asound.conf exactly as described in viewtopic.php?f=20&t=70166&start=15#p394523OK so everything works fine but with regard to the wheezy 1.7 version of minitube, after the above steps, simulating installation results in:

Looks OK but, to judge by other tests, while a compiled version of minitube works perfectly for me in stable, the 1.7-1.1 version from the wheezy repository does not work very well, sometimes jumping from one video to another before it has ended or even stopping so the solution for the time being seems to be to compile minitube from source in virtualbox as described in viewtopic.php?f=16&t=51504&start=60#p402252

For the few users who are interested in an alternative to alsa+pulseaudio, I thought I'd just add that, I've been having another look at OSS4 in wheezy recently and was surprised to find that the step:

is no longer necessary.On my testing, I've set Gnome 3 to classic mode, not new-fangled mode; however, an annoying thing is that, after getting rid of PulseAudio as described above, the handy little volume control disappears from the upper gnome panel. A way to keep it is to retain PulseAudio and to configure it to work with OSS4 as described in the opensound wiki, Configuring_Applications_for_OSSv4#Pulseaudio. I've tried this and it works; at least there is a volume control applet but the sound preference options are practically non-existent in comparison with the alsa-based setup. Perhaps there's a better solution but I haven't found one yet. But audio is - as always with OSS4 on my system - stellar.[Edit 04 May 2013.]:Volume Control Applet for OSS4 in Gnome 3Note, after instlling OSS4 in Gnome 3 Classic Mode, after rebooting there will be no volume applet on the upper panel. To remedy this, use the Super key + Alt and right-click -> add to panel ->add Volume Control to panel.My advice is: Do not configure pulseaudio to be used with OSS4 but remove it as already detailed in this topic.